The ‘24 Pitch
Apply the trader principle to media
This post, a pitch which began with checking reality, solicits paying for Autonomia.
You probably get slammed every December like I do. Charity requests abound. Blather about the virtue of giving—for the purpose of helping others—comes and goes with everyone wanting your money without regard to whether, let alone how, you make and keep what you earn. This week’s gimmick, Giving Tuesday—an unfortunate concoction in my opinion—provides an example: companies and organizations with tax-exempt status under the U.S. income tax code—send a message which redounds to: give money.
This is opposite my philosophy, which amounts to a proposition: think and consider trading up to consume what I create.
For the first time, I expanded Autonomia this year, adding audio and video podcasting, a new author’s byline and coaching the founding and annual paid subscriber’s writing. I did this while lowering the new subscription price and adding new social media (Pinterest, Quora and Notes, as well as my current top favorite X, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook).
Separately, I created a short story podcast as I gained first publication of my fiction writing—nine new stories have been published (or scheduled for publication) this year—while grieving, and writing about, great personal loss. As my storytelling gains an audience, I’m reaching an ever wider variety of readers.
Discover what Autonomia’s paid subscriber gains here. Values include coaching your writing skills—the founding subscriber gains the highest value—and other perks. In exchange, each paid subscription allows me to budget and block time to write. This affords me autonomy as an author. The writer-reader relationship deepens when the reader pays for what the writer produces. I learned this lesson in earnest at the age of 18, when I read writing by Ayn Rand, who also created media she exclusively wrote for the paid subscriber, which taught me the trader principle.
I realized the need to renew the effort to write for my life during a recent trip to a port city of my youth, San Diego, where I launched my writing career. This is where I once made an oath to myself and wrote as a message to the world—or to a stranger who could find and credit it—on a piece of paper, which I rolled and tucked into a bottle. Tightly corking and tossing the bottle into the ocean, I decided to become a professional writer.
Offering value for value in the arts has proven to be a lifelong challenge. This is why I’m asking you to consider trading up. I’m creating new rewards for the paid subscriber. I re-begin in the new year, marking the new century‘s 25th year—the 250th birthday of the nation which makes living by the trader principle, i.e., free trade, possible—with an independent, free press by a new intellectual.
Will you please think about trading up to—or making a gift of—a paid subscription?
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Short Stories by Scott Holleran
